3 ms·
To me, wikipedia is like a dog walking on its hind legs (as Samuel Johnson said of women preachers). The point isn't that it isn't done very well, the point is
by hugh3 15y ago
To me, wikipedia is like a dog walking on its hind legs (as Samuel Johnson said of women preachers). The point isn't that it isn't done very well, the point is that it works at all.
If you'd asked me, at the start of the wikipedia project, whether it would ever grow to be a useful resource I'd have said "hell no, it'll just get taken over by idiots, bad content will drive out good, you can never put together a useful resource by collaborative editing, it's a pipe dream". And yet here we are, in a situation where wikipedia is actually a damn good resource on just about any subject of interest.
Almost all the people who complain about wikipedia are people who are attempting to edit it. And some of them may have a point... while others are attempting to insert stuff that doesn't fit the guidelines. But as long as you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about?
- nitrogen 15y agoBut as long as you're using it in read-only mode, what's to complain about? The deletion of noteworthy information about popular programming languages is one example.
- hugh3 15y agoWhich one is that? Anyway, like I said, wikipedia ain't perfect, but it's amazing how far from terrible it is.
- nitrogen 15y agoAlice (http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+alice http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+a...), plus other important pages: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+deletion http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=wikipedia+d... I realize there's a tremendous amount of spam, vanity pages, vandalism, and useless content the editors have to deal with, but it's still disturbing to read about the occasional outbreaks of deletionism that affect Wikipedia, while corporate and political whitewashing goes apparently unchecked (I don't have a specific reference in mind).
- tommorris 15y ago...and that didn't happen in the end. I spend a lot of time doing non-administrative maintenance stuff around deletion. Most of the stuff that gets deleted at the "speedy deletion" level is complete trash. From the outside, people see their favourite programming language or webcomic or whatever get deleted, and, yes, that sucks. What they don't see is the reams of crap that get deleted every day. I'm pretty damn inclusionist, and there are people who are even more inclusionist than I am, but that doesn't mean they don't realise there is huge volumes of crap which ought to be deleted. See http://enwp.org/WP:AFD/T http://enwp.org/WP:AFD/T and http://enwp.org/CAT:CSD http://enwp.org/CAT:CSD Most people only encounter the deletion system because something they deeply care about has been nominated for deletion. They don't see that most of the time, the system works pretty well.